Hillary
Clinton chose to kick off her presidential campaign by invoking images
of -- what else? -- children. Her healthcare policy would target "millions
of children whose families today cannot afford care." Not the families
of the children. Hillary prefers to work directly with the children
themselves rather than their parents.

"We
are talking about health care for children in need, which is about
as safe an issue as there is," said Ken Sherrill, a political science
professor at Hunter College.

Safe
for a candidate perhaps, but safe for the children and our nation
it is not. In casting her questionable health care ideas as a measure
�for the children,� Hillary is returning us to the darkest days of
her husband�s administration, when a broad range of intrusive government
measures were cynically couched as concern for children.

This
is more than just another politician kissing babies. It represents
one of the most destructive (and successful) strategies of the feminist
Left in recent years: the exploitation of children as political weapons.

Hillary
is not alone. "Democrats across the board are putting children at
the center of their imagery and message," according to the Washington
Post. "Earlier this month, Rep. Nancy Pelosi made a vivid impression
by assuming the House speakership surrounded by a squadron of young
grandchildren. Sen. Barbara Boxer recently questioned whether Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice, not having family of her own, could understand
the stakes in Iraq." And, of course, a Democratic California assemblywoman
wants to criminalize spanking.

The
trend may be traced to Hillary�s mentor, Marian Wright Edelman, who
admitted she founded the Children�s Defense Fund in the early 1970s
upon realizing that the country was weary of the broader New Left
agenda: �I got the idea that children might be a very effective way
to broaden the base for change.� Edelman�s achievement was �to put
children squarely in the front of almost every domestic policy debate,�
according to the late Barbara Olson. In her book on the former First
Lady, Olson writes, �For Hillary, children are the levers by which
one forces social change.�

Largely
through Hillary, this motif dominated Bill Clinton�s presidency. �Children,�
wrote liberal columnist Richard Cohen, �have been an obsession for
this administration.� His point is borne out by the words of its officials.
�Government has got to ensure that parents are old enough, wise enough,
and able to care for their children,� Attorney General Janet Reno
insisted. Then-Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala
was especially zealous for government child-rearing, envisioning a
future kindergartener who �will play gender-neutral games in government
day care and think of herself as part of the world, not just her town
or the United States.�

One
does not have to be a Clinton-basher to see this eerily close to Aldous
Huxley�s prophecy of a totalitarian dystopia. Praising Hillary's book,
"It Takes a Village," for its message that "each of us -- society
as a whole -- bears responsibility for all children, even other people's
children," professors Stewart Friedman and Jeffrey Greenhaus insist
that we "must be prepared to make the most of the brave new world
lying in the future."

"Success
in the brave new world." they add, "requires skills found more among
women than men."

This
is far from harmless, either for public policy or for children themselves.
Political scientist Jean Bethke Elshtain writes that �The replacements
for parents and families would not be a happy, consensual world of
children coequal with adults but one in which children became clients
of institutionally powerful social bureaucrats and engineers of all
sorts for whom they would serve as so much grist for the mill of extra-familial
schemes and ambitions.�

This
is precisely what is suggested in Hillary�s aphorism: �There is no
such thing as other people�s children.� Hillary rejects the notion
that �families are private, nonpolitical units whose interests subsume
those of children� and believes instead in �the status of children
as political beings.�

Feminist-influenced
legal practitioners now openly advocate that traditional parental
authority be replaced by bureaucrats: �For those who would like to
have the State use its power and resources to improve the lives of
children, parental rights constitute the greatest legal obstacle to
government intervention to protect children from harmful parenting
practices and to state efforts to assume greater authority over the
care and education of children.�

These
words are published in the California Law Review, a mainstream journal
that asks �why parents should have any child-rearing rights at all.�

�Parental
child-rearing rights are illegitimate,� declared attorney James Dwyer.
�No one should possess a right to control the life of another person
no matter what reasons, religious or otherwise, he might have for
wanting to do so.�

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A
popular joke holds that within the family mom makes the minor decisions,
such as how to raise the children, while dad concerns himself with
important questions, like how to achieve world peace. This joke is
now grimly writ large in public policy. Conservatives who allow their
attention to be monopolized by foreign policy and government finance
and leave family policy to liberals from the �Mommy Party� will discover
only once it is too late the power of �the hand that rocks the cradle.�

Stephen Baskerville holds a PhD from the London
School of Economics and is president of the American Coalition for Fathers
and Children. His book, Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage,
and the Family, will be published in the summer of 2007 by Cumberland
House Publishing.